Episode 4: Jodhpur to Udaipur continued
Page 2
Lake Palace Hotel, Udaipur
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Tuesday December 12, 2000 Udaipur
Continued
from
Episode 4: Page 1
We try to stay in each spot a minimum of two nights,
so instead of moving on that afternoon, we just took it
easy. It makes our travels much more relaxing. Therefore,
we left for Udaipur on Saturday, just a three hour bus
ride. Udaipur is similar to Pushkar in that it is built
around lakes and is surrounded by hills. It was built by
the same maharana dynasty that built Chittorgarh, after
the third defeat of Chittor. The seven lakes are man
made, but after 7 or 8 years of little or no rain, the
water level is way down and they are dry in places. It is
also the only town so far that isn’t flat. The streets of
the old city are built on a hill leading up to the City
Palace .
A big draw for the small guesthouses in this area is
to show the James Bond movie Octopussy, which was
partially filmed in Udaipur, each evening on their
rooftop restaurants and our guesthouse was no exception.
Our guesthouse had two screens, so we ended up watching
American Beauty and The Patriot instead. Haven’t seen a
movie for ages so it was a change. I must admit I agree
with the critics about the Patriot; all the Brits are
despicable and Mel Gibson, an Aussie, wins the American
War of Independence single handedly. Lots of blood and
gore.
Sunday morning we did the City Palace,
actually hiring a guide to take us around and give us the
history. From the front entrance gardens, the Palace, the
largest in Rajasthan, presents a high flat wall , with
the most decorative windows and balconies on the top 2
floors. This is because the Palace was built on the very
tip of the hill and envelopes the hill on all sides.
Consequently, there is an inner courtyard on one of the
upper floors with trees growing around a decorative pool.
The part of the Palace we toured constitutes just part of
the whole complex. Part of the palace is still occupied
by the current Maharana and he has converted sections
next to the lake into two luxury hotels. In addition, his
summer Palace, in the middle of the lake facing the City
Palace, was the first Rajasthani Palace converted to a
hotel, but they are way out of our league. Even a dinner
there is too expensive for our budget.
In the afternoon, we took an auto rickshaw a short
distance out of town to see the Monsoon Palace. The
Palace, on a hilltop overlooking the city, is closed to
the public, but we went for the walk and the view. The
entire hill was once a hunting preserve for the maharana
and is now a nature reserve. As evidenced by the many
paintings we saw in the City Palace, the maharanas sure
did like to kill wild animals. No wonder they are now
scarce. We had the rickshaw let us off part way up and
walked the rest of the way up the switch backs. We were
passed part way up by a motorcycle carrying two men and
one of them got off and hailed us down. He said he was a
policeman and warned us not to buy anything in shops to
which a rickshaw driver would take us. He said the prices
are vastly inflated to pay the commissions demanded by
the rickshaw drivers. I guess there is a campaign on to
clean up the tourist gouging. At any rate, we didn’ t
have any problems with our driver. We were hoping to
persuade the custodians to let us into to the Palace to
get even better vantage points, but we were not
successful, even with the assistance of an Indian tourist
with the same idea. Oh well, we still did admire the
views.
Horse Dance
Dancers
Monday we arranged another tour by rickshaw to see
several of Udaipur’s gardens and to visit Shilpgram, just
out of town. Udaipur’s gardens are very well maintained,
especially by Indian standards and given the lack of
water. The city is very pleasant to visit and spend time
just relaxing.
Shilp means
‘arts’ and this village was the project of Rajiv Ghandi
to depict village life. It is sort of like our Pioneer
villages back home and is constructed very tastefully.
They have built traditional houses from four states of
India, Rajasthan, Goa, Gujarat and Maharashtra. People from these
areas come and stay for two weeks to perform music and
dances and to make and sell their crafts. When we
visited, the inhabitants were busy repainting the houses
with fresh decorations and building new craft stalls in
preparation for the onslaught on tourists for a big
festival starting December 24. It was thankfully
uncrowded for our visit, but the inhabitants still gave
dance and puppet shows at each different site. The guide
we hired to take us around did a good job explaining the
different cultures and filled in a lot of gaps in our
knowledge gained on our other village visits in Rajasthan.
Painted farm building
House decorated for wedding
Painted farm house wall
This afternoon we walked up another hillside to
see Udaipur from another vantage point. This area is
called sunset hill as it looks down over the City Palace
and across the lake. There always seems to be a beautiful
sunset in India, helped by the haze in the air.
Tomorrow we leave Udaipur and Rajasthan. We are going
to Ahmedaban, the capital of Gujarat state and from there
we plan to visit small tribal villages in the area they
call the Kutch. Stay tuned for the next episode.
Take care and have a pre-Christmas drink for us. We
are missing our beer and wine in India! It is either not
available or outrageously expensive.
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